Paradise Alley by Kevin Baker

keeping his eyes down. You never knew who might be watching. The endless, shifting crowds of pickpockets and day laborers and drunkards, killingtime along the docks. Watching, always watching. It was the one thing they had to do that didn’t cost money. It would be a mistake to waste money on a bed, for all he knew they had already moved on, would certainly have done so if they had any sense at all.
    But then, if they’d any sense they never would have crossed him—
    Fourteen years. First the voyage ’round the Horn, then all that time in the prison the Vigilantes had sent him to, in the foothills of the Sierras. Sawing planks or breaking rock, chained to a line of other men. The jail hadn’t been that tough, just a stockade of logs, stuck out in the wilderness. Once he had even gotten hold of a file from the sawhouse, concealing the thing up his sleeve. Working assiduously at his irons every night, after the other men in his cell were asleep. Waiting until he was out on a party felling trees before he cut the last strand of metal and simply ran off blindly into the woods, certain that no man could catch him then, no matter what he had to do.
    But he had had no food and he couldn’t trap any game, what with having to stay ahead of the dogs every day. He had never encountered trees —forests— like that before, and before long he had no idea where he was. That was the point of the prison, stuck out in the wilderness so far that no white man could ever find his way back. And every morning there were the dogs again, and the men on horseback. Chasing him farther up into the mountains until finally—starving and bruised, his boots in ribbons, flesh cut and welted by brambles and the whiplike tree branches—he had been run out on a cleared white rock ledge where he had wept, and howled like a wolf in his rage and his frustration.
    He had wanted to simply throw himself over the edge, then and there, but he couldn’t make himself. Not so long as they were alive. Not so long as they had what belonged to him.
    He couldn’t let himself go, not so long as he could think about that. Thinking, that was the damned shame of it. He’d always been cursed with the ability to think, he’d known that since back in the poorhouse in Cork city.
    Whereas other men were just insensate lumps of desire, no better than hogs—
    Because he could think, he had let them chain him up again and march him back to the prison. He had let them give him six months in solitary, and his sentence doubled for trying to escape.
    All that useless time. Thinking about nothing but what it would be like when he got back here, to the City. But what was time, time or distance, to the likes of him? Now he had come back, just as he had sworn he would. Now he could think to some purpose, more than just to keep himself alive.
    Back to claim what was his—his wife, and his treasure. So where to look first?
    He kept still for a little longer, in the shadows of the tavern. Best to try that niggers’ nest first. The Nigger Village, up in the scrub woods and the swampy lowlands above Fifty-ninth Street, half a mile or so past Pigtown. If they were foolish enough to be there still, thinking they would be protected by his people.
    Well, they would see about that. There wasn’t a whole city of niggers that could keep them safe from him.
    He rubbed the coins together again. Enough for a drink, anyway, though he had no real idea what the price might be anymore. At least one drink, he should have that just to take the edge off the thinking—
    He went around a corner, to the saloon he’d noticed the night before. A name he remembered from the old days, though he wasn’t quite sure why: The Yellow Man. He tried to walk over to the bar as inconspicuously as possible, with his head down. Even so, the barman gave a start when he looked up. The other men along the rail backing off ever so slowly, the way they would